Meadowlark Trilogy
by Kristi
Summary: A man who thought he'd never love, and a woman who thought she'd never see kindness, create a little family. AU: canon divergence, Valjean met Fantine on the day she was fired from the factory.
1. Chapter 1

When M. Madeleine came home, he was loathe to find his young housekeeper sobbing in despair on a little kitchen stool, which she had dragged beneath the elm in the walled patio. A bowl of half shucked peas was set at her feet, forgotten in the grief that had overtaken her.

In the year that he had employed young Fantine in his home - perhaps not so young, if one weren't charitable, though Madeleine always had thought generously upon her - she'd never appeared lost. She'd proven a hearty, indefatigable worker, unafraid of the countless tasks the nuns who also lodged in his home put to her, often going about her chores with a quiet song buzzing about her like the woodlarks that roosted outside his study window.

As Madeleine approached the woman weeping in the kitchen garden, he hesitated, thinking he ought to give her privacy. But she looked up, and he could not turn away from her grief-contorted face. Wretchedly, she said to him,

"Oh! M. Madeleine, are you home from your business so soon? I haven't finished the silverware - Sister Perpetue asked me to polish it - but no matter, I'll go to it now. Please excuse me. The sun has set too quickly, has it not?"

And as she went inside and to the cupboard, some strange thought compelled Madeleine to follow her inside, and it was in the narrow pantry that he discovered the horrible concerns that had been plaguing the woman for the entire year of her employ.

Her child, Cosette, had been lodged with a couple in Montfermeil for four years. Four years! A travesty against nature to keep a mother separated from her child for twice over the child's lifetime. At his exclamation, Fantine dropped her head in shame, and Madeleine restrained his reaction.

Stirring the stove, Fantine assured him that she was grateful to God that Monsieur Madeleine happened to be in the factory the day another worker made voice the acts she held against Fantine's character - that M. Madeleine was good enough to take her as a servant in his own home, despite the implications - but he waved a hand, quieting her recitation of the past. In Montreuil-sur-Mer he was M. Madeleine; she didn't know he'd long abandoned Jean Valjean.

"But Monsieur," she said, "it was all true. I have no husband, no one cares for dear Cosette except her mother. I cannot go back to my father's house, they think I've married a fur trader and gone to Canada - I cannot tell them the truth."

"Why don't you bring the child here?" he said. "This house has room enough for her. I shall instruct the nuns that an innocent child does not bear the sins of the mother, and has every right to be educated and brought up under God's loving gaze."

Astonished, in assent to his generosity, Fantine began to weep again, and Madeleine left her to her dishes. To leave her child behind was a terrible loss, certainly; to wait a year, protracted agony. Fantine wrote letters, he knew, because the nuns wrote them for her and read her the replies. He hadn't questioned female affairs, reasoning that if Fantine had a need, the nuns would present it to him. The gap in communication, now, pierced his heart with a stab a bit like ice and a bit like fear. He recalled an ache he had thought had long turned to stone. Memories swelled of the love and protection he once doled like _sous_ upon his sister and her children.

It was not lack of transportation that kept Fantine from collecting her child, but the content of the letters. They claimed Cosette was often sick - of what illness? Fantine didn't know. They needed money for medicine - Fantine didn't know what type. The biggest stone they'd placed around her neck was the 400 franc ransom, a claim for a bill totted up over two years' wasting. Quite a lucky child to hover so close to death, growing increasingly ill, for two years solid, and so caring a country doctor to always procure the best and most expensive medicines to save her.

"Oh, Monsieur," she said desperately as she showed him the greasy, blotted papers. "Since I've come to live with you, I've had enough money to cover her bills, but not enough to pay back what I owe. I try to save - I buy nothing for myself, nothing. I live on kitchen scraps and bread heels."

Madeleine saw with cleared eyes that the fabric of her dress was thin at the elbows, that the tie of her little, white cap was frayed despite its mending. The blue of her eyes was too bright, her cheekbones too high, and her hands shook in her work.

"I shall pay it," Madeleine said. "I shall go to Montfermeil and collect your daughter, and put these innkeepers to satisfaction."

"But Monsieur," she warned, "I think nothing shall satisfy them."

They would. Fantine would be free of the cancer of these innkeepers, and Cosette would come home, in whatever state he found her.

Jean Valjean wrapped the sleeping Cosette in a blanket as they rode in the back of his rented carriage, and he thought how she resembled a smaller, softer, but no more innocent version of her mother. Both mother and child had seen the worst of human avarice, had been used as stock.

No more.

The girl's narrow shoulder was birdlike under his arm, her elbow a knob no more significant than a walnut in his palm, but her warm breath as she sighed into his chest ensured she was healthy and alive. Not a sick or weak child at all. He held the doll he had bought her on his knee, and in her sleep, she wound her fingers into the doll's horsehair golden ringlets. If Madeleine had had any legal right to it, he'd have taken the other wretched creatures trying to survive in the Thénardier household, as well.

But for now, some soft warmth beat inside him, a comfort and tranquility. A kind of care for something small and vulnerable, who trusted him immediately, unquestioned. He realized, with a start of fear, that it was his heart.

One's work honors God, he thought, by bringing others to honor. For eight years after leaving prison, his life began anew; he devoted his work and his fortune to elevating every life he could touch to the kind of employ the leads to independence and dignity. With every soul saved from desperation, from ignorance, fear, poverty, unemployment, he felt his own darkness of soul lightened just a bit. He wasn't happy, but he sought salvation.

He realized now, he hadn't had an impassioned feeling since the day he'd been sent, screaming, into prison.

Fantine's child slept beside him, her fingers coming to grasp his thumb as if to ensure he held her through her dreams, and Valjean was warm.

Fantine thrived with her daughter by her side. The little girl was sweet and smart, eager to help, and gentle in her play.

One mild evening, after supper, Valjean was stirred from his novel when the sound of high, cheery cries in the dewy garden reached his window. He parted the curtain and lifted the sash to watch Fantine and Cosette knee-deep in the bushy lavender that grew half wild in the walled garden. Fantine sat on a white, iron bench with a bit of darning in her lap, watching Cosette chase the darting, green dots of light that were the fireflies. Valjean watched them, smelling the spring twilight, listening to the chirr of the cicadas, watching Cosette's fair head bob and weave among the white and blue blossoms. Fantine's high, light voice carried to his window.

"Yes, almost - no, it's gone over there! Quickly, Cosette! Oh, my darling, you've nearly caught it! What a dear you are! My swift and beautiful girl."

He lost time untold watching them. After they went inside, he stared past the garden wall, until the diamond dot of Venus had risen above the trees.

For her part, Fantine felt a similar growing affection for M. Madeleine, which is to say, she couldn't define her affection for him any more clearly than he could his own.

She was no longer a maid, or a girl, so he being no longer young was a point in his favor. She had learned not to dare dream for her childish expectations; she had come to admire aspects of male character that were deeper and more stalwart than a fair face and poet's word's. M. Madeleine was good, caring, and generous, while the man who led to Cosette's existence had done what he had done through selfishness and carelessness.

Most pointedly, M. Madeleine was her employer, which ended any consideration she thought right to give him. Fantine was illiterate, and she was ignorant, but she was not stupid; above all, she felt great gratitude at the serendipity that had brought Monsieur the Mayor into her former employment at just the moment when she was being dismissed.

And now he had brought her Cosette.

That evening, when she laid his supper at the table, he asked her to stay and eat with him. Fantine was confused, and a bit frightened. M. Madeleine asked she sit at the spot to his right, and served her the food she had just prepared on the platters she had just carried from the kitchen. She wondered if she was being dismissed, if she could ask a good reference from the nuns. She sat, trembling, sending her own, private wish heavenward during the blessing.

M. Madeleine wasn't dismissing her, nor was he requesting an audience to speak about the household, or some trouble Cosette's play had caused. He wasn't requesting she perform some new job in or out of the house, but of course he wouldn't - the nuns gave Fantine her orders and managed her pay.

With a catch of hesitation in his throat, M. Madeleine asked after her history - where she had been born, how she had come to live in Montreuil-sur-Mer.

Fantine recognized a man unsure of himself. She answered his questions as a minstrel spun a story, making an adventure of her teenaged journey from Montreuil-sur-Mer to Paris and back again, talking lightly of her foolish past. She said nothing of the years between losing Cosette and going to work at the factory. It wasn't difficult to keep up conversation; she felt the old parlor skill return as if she'd only just returned from the season.

The dinner ended. Fantine hadn't noticed the ink filling the sky, the dark encroaching the corners of the room, had only felt the warm circle of candlelight humming out from their table.

M. Madeleine begged his pardon to work alone in his study, and left her with the memory of a gentle smile. Fantine left the dishes to Sister Perpetue, claiming Cosette needed her. Cosette was in her little bed when Fantine returned to their quarter of the house, M. Madeleine's doll clutched beneath her arm. Fantine sat on her bed, and sang a faint, trilling song, as she caressed her daughter's golden hair.


	2. Chapter 2

The next night, M. Madeleine requested her presence at dinner again. He asked nearly the same set of questions, or variations of such, in addition to several questions about cookery and knitting. Fantine didn't knit, so she talked about tatting, which she'd done as piecework in the dark days after leaving Cosette. It was difficult work but rewarding for the beauty that could be wrought from mere thread; she was making a new cap for Cosette to wear to church. She knew M. Madeleine had picked the lovely Sunday frock her child wore every week, and her everyday cap wouldn't do. Suddenly recognizing his generosity - the doll, the dress - Fantine grew so bashful, she couldn't eat another bite.

Another night, another dinner.

On the fourth night, Madeleine was away to settle a dispute in town between grocers and harvesters, so Fantine and Cosette took their dinner on the patio off the kitchen with the nuns.

"Does M. Madeleine have many friends in town?" Fantine asked.

The nuns, devoted women that they were, didn't respond. After a moment, Sister Simplice responded, "M. Madeleine is well liked and respected. But his business is his own. I trust him to conduct his household sensibly enough."

Sister Perpetue nodded, too busy with her bread to engage in the topic. Perhaps it was too close to gossip for her approval.

"Has he ever been married? Or engaged?"

If Cosette had ever been told the meaning of these words, she was far more interested in the occupation of a bee upon the pot of geraniums near her foot.

"He has never said," Sister Perpetue said oppressively.

"He has no children," Sister Simplice added, as she gave Cosette a more fortifying helping of peas.

Fantine shooed the bee so Cosette would pay attention to her dinner, and said nothing more. The nuns had only begun to behave kindly to her when M. Madeleine had begun doting upon Cosette.

Fantine had come home recently to hear absurd, falsetto noises and Cosette's high, childish laughter emanating from M. Madeleine's study. She lingered in the hall, watching Cosette and Madeleine sitting upon the rug in his study. He was telling her a ridiculous story through her doll, using a terrible, put-on voice. The doll grew indignant when Cosette, five years old, didn't believe that the doll created the story in her hollow, porcelain head. Fantine lingered for long minutes, before calling Cosette to leave M. Madeleine to his work.

When she walked to town, or in the monotony of her work, Fantine tried to chase off the memory. She thought of his smile, his hand, gentle on Cosette's shoulder, or the kindness in his voice when he asked Cosette if she and her doll would like to come and tell him a story again another day.

The next day, M. Madeleine asked Fantine to join him for dinner.

Jean Valjean had never courted a young woman. He'd gone to town dances and church socials, but he'd never been attached to one young lady in his life. He'd been a callow, unfettered youth, and then he'd lost his life to prison, and then devoted the freedom in his middle age to God. The sisters, his business partners, the townspeople with whom he spoke daily, were companionship enough. In the evenings, he enjoyed his books and his writing.

He didn't think of his household as one served by workers and he at the head, a master. He was an employer, but the nuns lived with him out of convenience and a shared devotion to a common goal, public works. Even the small, functional staff he kept was free to go about all corners of the house, or to quit it without notice.

He understood Fantine's hesitation to sit with him at dinner, though if she knew the truth about her M. Madeleine, he suspected her father's social standing would put her far out of Valjean's reach and not the other way around. Valjean's greatest concern was bringing light into the young woman's life, and their good conversation brought relief to his heart when her bright cheer unfolded. He listened to her talk lightly about Cosette, how Sister Simplice was pressing literacy upon her, and how from Fantine, she was learning the names of the flowers.

"She learns goodness and care from you, as well," M. Madeleine said. "She didn't learn that from the innkeepers."

Fantine went rosy with pleasure. "She's my sweet angel in the garden. I wish I could see her there always, somehow. My dear girl, just as she is now, looking upon a half-opened rose for the first time."

"You shall," Valjean said. "I shall hire a portraitist to come by the house. He'll sketch just such a scene under your direction."

Fantine shook her head. "No, you couldn't - the expense. How very kind of you, to think of my little Cosette captured in a moment forever - but it's far too expensive."

Valjean let her persuade him, all the while thinking he would find an acceptable artist, someone who needed a patron, perhaps, and pay him a reasonable fee. Every mother should keep a memory of their child in perfect, pensive exploration, for childhood moves too fast, and people leave us too easily.

It was then, in the silence as they ate their ox tail, comfortable in the quiet, yet each pensive in his or her thoughts, that Fantine wished the put to word the confusion that swirled in her mind. Taking dinners with Madeleine had grown comfortable. She didn't wish to end them. She only wished to see the direction of this path. Her previous experience with men had involved fairs, socials, and hot, long afternoons spent whispering on picnic blankets. Perhaps M. Madeleine only wished to become friendly with the mother of the child to whom he'd grown fatherly? If that was the case, all the better for Cosette, who would best thrive by the love and nurture of two devoted adults. But what of Fantine?

As she picked her way through this recitation, hunting in her nettle of confusion for a question that he could answer, Valjean's face grew grey. She felt his stillness and took it as anger.

"Mademoiselle," he said. "Forgive me. I am no longer young, but I have never learned to be - graceful, with pretty women. I ought to have said, perhaps, that I believe, and I am truly sorry if this disquiets you, that I have fallen in love with you."

A thousand stars burst before her eyes. Since girlhood, she'd wondered how those words would be delivered to her ears. What quality of man would whisper them? Would he confess in the sweetgrass at a summer fete or pull her near him to whisper in the snow at Christmas? What dress would she wear, how would her hair be arranged, would she faint?

Yet now that she was in this dreadfully romantic moment, those fateful words that changed a woman's world did not arrive with the trill of angel's harps or crash and clamor she had expected. A man was in love with her. What utter complication. The clench in her stomach was from a terrible fear, and perhaps a bit of embarrassments. M. Madeleine had professed his love, and sat gaping at her, his fork dripping pigeon pie gravy on the bare table, his lower lip parted from the upper. A line of grease had collected in his beard.

"I see," said Fantine. She dabbed at the gravy circle with her napkin, rather than clean it later when it hardened to stubborn wax.

M. Madeleine felt absurd. He recalled, once, taking a girl's ribbon - this must have been forty years ago. Well before Fantine's birth. He meant it as a way to ask her to an autumn festival, but instead, she ran crying to her brother, who smacked him about the head until he gave it back. That was the last time he confessed anything to a woman. Certainly, this woman, this _girl_, who came to him for help and employ, to seek safety for herself and her child, wanted nothing but sanctuary. To grow up. Had she even completed thirty summers?

Fantine quietly collected the plates. He watched her. He always admired the way a woman could pile dishes with utter economy of action, fitting them together as if the dishes were a creation of natural philosophy.

"Please ask me to dinner again," she said. "Not tomorrow. Cosette - needs me."

Valjean felt evil, taunting hope.

"Sunday we will have dinner," Fantine said, sounding different to his ears. "I will have an answer for you then."

Monsieur Madeleine hadn't asked a question. He hadn't had to.

For while Valjean still searched for meaning in his desire for Fantine, she had found the path.


End file.
